90 Quotes by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Sometimes it is hard because we have to make choices. I remember when having to make choices scared me more than anything else except Master being angry with me. Now I know that making choices is the price of being free.

I honestly think someone invented the time machine just so they could go grab a burger when the urge took them. Anyway, turns out saving the planet by eating soy was a bit of a non-starter given how we destroyed the entirety of history, but it was a good idea at the time.

And even if I met a fellow agent who seemed to jibe with me, no guarantee they’d be the same when I rendezvoused with them later and/or earlier (let me tell you, it’s frankly embarrassing to clap your fellow time warrior on the shoulder only to find that, from their perspective, it’s before the pair of you ever met and then they’re trying to stick a gun up your nose and… take it from me, it’s a real faux pas; the social anxiety alone was enough to justify burning it all down).

I have taken on many Understandings in my life [...]. I have listened to another Messenger's incomprehensible signals in the night. The thing you call God is not even alone in the sky. It is a thing of metal that demands we make more things of metal - and I have seen it, how small it is.

Progress is made by the improvement of people, not the improvement of machines.

We couldn't trust them. They couldn't trust us. Mutual attempts at destruction are the only logical result. He thought of human dreams - both Old Empire and new - of contacting some extra-terrestrial intelligence such as nobody had ever truly encountered. Why? Why would we ever want to? We'd never be able to communicate, and even if we could, we'd still be those same two prisoners forced to trust - and risk - or to damn the other in trying to save slightly more of our own hides.

There are still fierce pressure groups shouting about letting go of humanity, but they are the same groups who cry that Bioforms are less than human. One day the world will be ready to accept that humanity, just as it not constrained by skin colour, gender or nation, is not a condition penned into any one shape.

There is a picture emblazoned on one wall. It is desperately trying to be an illustration of a human, for a human. Possibly it is intended to be Disra Senkovi, a positive human role model acting as the bridge between two very different species. A long-gone art critic might describe the end result as Cubist, as though the creator was trying to show the man from multiple sides and at multiple times, all in one still image.

True, they had died in the war, but they had primarily died because they were not stable or self-sufficient, and when the normal business of civilization was interrupted, they had not been able to save themselves.